you'll be home before lunch
by Arixa23
Summary: Jojo is very good at being a kid and being a Thinker, and the Cat is very good at helping with that. But being good at Thinking doesn't mean it's going to be easy for Jojo to grow up. (A hard look at what could happen when Jojo hits puberty. Dark fic, but relatively canon and with a happyish ending.)


Author's Note:

This fic has been an _incredibly_ long time in the making. I started work on it almost exactly two years ago and wrote about a draft and a half's worth of story before setting it aside for other projects, picking it up again almost a year later for some betaing, subsequently being overwhelmed with the amount of work it needed and setting it aside again. And now it's still a little unpolished (though I have done a third round of editing and I think it's pretty road-worthy), but I'm uploading it anyway.

Why? Because 1. it's a long fic and I've put a _lot_ of work into it and I think it's actually pretty good even though I haven't really been anywhere near this fandom for about a year and a half, and 2. it's the most technically impressive piece of longer writing I've ever pulled off. Give it a read-through and let me know if you can spot what I mean; if you _can't_ spot what I mean, let me know that too and I'll be even happier because that means I did it well.

Trigger warnings: self-harm, attempted suicide (look, it's not a light fic)

…

you'll be home before lunch

...

It's been two weeks since Jojo was introduced to the Cat in the Hat and to the full possibilities of Thinking, and since then, almost every day has been filled with daydreams and inventions and trips to strange and wonderful places, practically to the exclusion of anything else. The real world and its inhabitants have always seemed somewhat dull and boring to Jojo, but never more so now that it has the vibrant, quirky world of Thinks to compete with. The suddenly-notable Thinker of Thinks takes no notice of the adults, who are starting to be worried by their student's or child's slipping grades and permanent spaciness. Anyway, the Cat, who, funnily enough, tends to pop up in the real world more than in Thinks (apparently Jojo is now deemed capable of navigating Thinking semi-independently, though the Cat will occasionally come along to stir up mischief), is always quick to point out that the majority of the greatest people in history have been Thinkers, and _their_ parents probably weren't too thrilled about it either.

"Plus, you're learning a whole lot of new stuff, aren't you?" the Cat adds. "Just learn to apply it to your own world too."

"Yeah." Jojo sighs. "I just don't feel like it now, 'kay?"

The Cat shrugs, a whole-body affair involving hands as well as shoulders. "Then we'll work on it another day."

...

When Jojo has been a Thinker for nearly a full eight months, the news comes: they're moving to another town for Mom's new job. Jojo wouldn't mind this all that much (Thinks are fully transportable, after all, and fit in any size house), except for what Dad says on the day when they stand out on their lawn waiting for the moving van to come. "This is an opportunity for you to make some new friends, Jojo," he says. It's more of an order than a suggestion really, like many things that he says. "It's a new start, a new school – maybe you won't be so lonely anymore, and you'll have things to do other than sitting in your room all day and reading and just Thinking. You'll be able to get out and have fun, huh?"

"But I like Thinking," Jojo says, in a very small voice which is erased by the noise of the moving van pulling up. It also erases the subsequent quiet statement of "And I've _got_ friends already," and the adults wouldn't have understood that even if they could have heard.

"He's got a point, I must admit," says a voice. Jojo turns to see the Cat standing on the driveway of their soon-to-be-vacated house, hands in pockets. "You have been missing out a bit. Try making some friends from this new school and town; your Thinks won't just leave you, don't give me that frown."

Jojo smiles slightly. "Well, okay, if you say so, I'll give it a try. But if things do go wrong, then, I'll want to know why."

"Jojo!" an unidentified voice calls from the moving van. "Stop standing in the driveway and talking to yourself in rhyme, and come help us with these boxes already!"

Jojo and the Cat grin at each other, and the Thinker skips off buoyantly toward the van, humming.

...

"My friends all made fun of me at school today," Jojo, aged ten-and-three-quarters, confides to Horton in a small moment of quiet as they sit up in one of Nool's large, spreading fluffy-topped trees with their chins on their hands and their elbows on their knees. Of course, Jojo as a Whoville kid is on a vastly different scale than Horton and it's still a slight source of puzzlement how they ever manage to conduct a private conversation without all of Whoville hearing every word Horton says. But that's the magic of Thinking for you; you don't have to work out all the details.

Jojo's been to an awful lot of places in the last year and made an awful lot of new friends, but the Jungle is the one place that the Thinker always ends up coming back to – in the form of a Who, of course. Horton wouldn't recognize any other form for his friend than that little voice on the clover, and Jojo doesn't really mind. Not too much. Having an elephant for a best friend pretty much means that the two of you aren't going to be on the same scale no matter what, anyway.

"I don't know, Jojo," Horton rumbles, his deep voice reaching the Who's tiny ears as a distorted growl which takes some effort for anyone who isn't a Thinker to understand. "These kids really don't sound like very good friends to me."

"They're not really," agrees Jojo. "I mean, they're not really my friends, they're just kids from the soccer team who I have to hang out with. But still."

"What did they tease you about this time?" Horton asks.

Jojo sighs. "About my Thinks. About speaking up in class and suggesting other answers than the ones the teacher gives. And they say I'm too old to have imaginary friends."

"Imaginary?" Horton scoffs. "Who's imaginary? Just because I'm too big for them to see, it doesn't mean I don't exist. A person's a person, no matter how large!"

Jojo laughs. "I know. They're all just _stupid._ It's like you trying to prove Whoville, in reverse. They can't see you or hear you, and they won't listen to me."

"Well, as long as they're not going to boil me in oil, why don't you just ignore them?" Horton suggests. "You've got friends here. I mean, me and Gertrude and Louisa Lou – she's learning to fly, by the way, you should see her. She's already going higher than_ I_ can see." Jojo laughs. "And how about that Cat who's always slinking around?" the elephant adds. "There's another friend for you, right?"

"The Cat's not my friend," Jojo says quickly. "But yeah, you're right. Everyone at my school is just stupid. I try and ignore them. It's just _hard._"

...

The bluffs (or are they cliffs?) are purple-gray in the evening sun, flocking with both Ziffs and Zuffs who whir in and out of their cliff cubby caves (or bluff building burrows), calling in multi-toned voices. Jojo sits in one of the abandoned cubbies, Converse-d feet dangling two hundred feet over the waves below, tracking their flight paths as they trail through the air.

"They're nesting," the Cat says, coming forward from the back of the cave and joining Jojo in the entrance. No matter where Jojo goes, the Cat is there, or at least has the potential of being there at any moment, whether Jojo minds or not, and lately it's been more on the side of not. Louisa Lou, the Elephant-Bird, is going through her equivalent of the terrible twos, and Horton and Gertrude both have their hands full. Besides, annoying though the Cat may be, it is nice on occasion to know another person who travels outside and through the stories. Even Horton can't be confided in about _everything._

"I wish I could do that," Jojo comments, watching the Zuffs (or are they Ziffs?) dive and swoop against the sunset. "Just fly away from everything."

"Yeah..." The Cat looks pensively out over the water and cliffs (or are they bluffs?), chin in hands, then grins suddenly and grabs Jojo's hand. "I've got an idea. Jump."

"What?"

"_Jump!_"

Jojo stares down at the choppy water far below, and then at the Cat and out at the winging birds, and grins back. And concentrates, and pushes off the edge of the cliff.

And the two of them soar.

…

"Get out!" Jojo shouts, slamming the kitchen door shut and throwing pots and pans to the floor to drown out the Cat's voice. "_Go away!_"

"I'll be going," the Cat says from the sink, leaning against the dish drainer and looking smooth as can be, "but first, let me say–"

...

It's Jojo's eleventh birthday and the citizens of Whoville have baked a triple-layer cake and are all waiting around in the town square to sing Happy Birthday to the tiny Who who saved their whole world from a sticky end. They have been waiting for three hours already – in Whoville, of course, there is no such thing as homework, and the kids all get to hang out at home and do whatever it is they want to do until their parents come home from work. And thus, the citizens of the town are simply unable to comprehend what is taking their hero so long. The growing Truffula trees cast long shadows over the square, a reminder of just another one of Jojo's adventures – once the Once-ler had been hunted down and allowed to explain his story, he had been surprisingly affable in helping to replant the trees. The Whos, waiting and tired now of standing statue-still in formation, sit down in the striped trees' shade and watch the cake melting slowly.

It's nearly six o'clock by the time the leader of the band, a tallish Who in a high striped hat and white gloves, stands up and stretches and addresses the crowd. "Well, it looks like that Jojo ain't gonna show up. Everybody go home – take the cake, Mrs. Strupp. Mr. Mayor, we organized this just for you, you'd better find Jojo if it takes all of Who!"

The Mayor nods and turns homewards to search for Jojo in all the places he's checked less than five times already. And, what with everybody slogging homeward with their hats and confetti and triple-necked Gooshorns trailing behind them, nobody notices the leader of the band slipping into an alley and discreetly dematerializing.

In another house in another town in another world, Jojo is deep in concentration on history homework when the Cat appears in the middle of the kitchen table, scattering bits of diorama this way and that. The newly-minted eleven-year-old looks up, ready to yell in indignation, but the Cat speaks first. "_Jo_jo! It's your birthday! Who's all thrown a big party – and you sit here studying, tardy as tardy! Come on!"

"I've got work," Jojo protests, flapping a half-written essay in the Cat's face before scrambling to rescue the diorama. The Cat glances at the scribbled essay – something anyone could write, a waste of a Thinker's time – and tosses it aside. "Well, that work can be shirked! They've baked you a cake with five layers, maybe six; if you don't come and get it, I'll be in a fix."

"Wait." Jojo, on hands and knees on the floor gathering bits of diorama into a pile, looks up. "_You _told them it was my birthday?"

"Well, of course, who else would? I mean, clearly _you_ should; but lately you've hardly had time, so I thought: you deserve something grand. Tell me, should I have not?"

Jojo shakes no quickly. "No... that was really nice of you. I just... can't remember you ever doing anything actually nice for me before."

Though it doesn't show, this hurts the Cat. They both know, or they certainly _should _both know, that almost all of the good things that have happened to Jojo in the past year and a half – certainly all of the good Thinks, and last time the Cat checked there wasn't much else explicitly good going on in the kid's life – would never have happened if it hadn't been for that first introductory Think, i.e., the Cat. All right, said Think has also gotten Jojo in an awful lot of trouble in the past year and a half, but nothing _bad_ has ever actually happened. There are real-life lessons being taught here, real life-lessons, the Cat is orchestrating everything like a master puppeteer and every conflict has a pre-planned resolution, and if Jojo ever fell, really fell, you can be sure that the Cat would be there underneath with a big net, shouting instructions on safe landing positions. For certain. Always.

But to state this would be to give Jojo a heads-up and spoil the current plan, as well as all future plans, and there doesn't seem to be any other way to plead innocence. So the Cat follows the rule that all emotions cease to be serious if overplayed enough and produces a large red handkerchief out of a jacket pocket and begins sobbing into it. "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry, Jojo... I do my best, I really do..."

Jojo gets up off the floor and shoves the bits of diorama into a box, laughing. "Stop it."

The Cat sniffs, honks loudly into the handkerchief, folds it, and replaces it in its former resting place. "Come on, kid. They're all waiting for you."

"Cat..." Jojo sighs. "I want to come. I've wanted to come all week. But I _have_ to finish my homework. My real parents are getting more and more like Mr. and Mrs. Mayor all the time, and I mean like them _before_ I got sent to the army. They throw a fit now if I don't get my work done."

The Cat shrugs. "So let them! Use your mind, use your Thinks, and if they stop you, forget them."

"It doesn't work that way," Jojo says, beginning to get exasperated at the Cat's persistence. "Look, just let me finish this essay and–"

But the Cat is fed up with all this debating, and before Jojo can finish the sentence, they're both in Whoville – no big effects, no swirly transportation tunnels, the living room of Jojo's house is just suddenly a street on a speck of dust on a clover, with no real transition, as the Cat's Thinks tend to work when Thinked under time pressure. The citizens re-congregate within seconds and lift Jojo on their shoulders to the center of town, and the cake is quickly brought out of cold storage and the band off of the soda counter, and by this point there's no way to squirm out of all of this politely or even impolitely. What the Cat wants, happens, no matter how little Jojo wants it to.

It's very, very late by the time Whoville and the Cat finally let Jojo go home, too late to do anything at all but fall into bed exhausted, let alone finish the abandoned homework. And of course the inevitable happens, as it's happened so many times before – the essay isn't turned in on time and the teacher calls Jojo's parents for a talk. And so Jojo's parents call Jojo into the living room for a rather more vehement talk, one which involves quite a bit of yelling and hysteria and finally _revoking all privileges of any kind whatsoever until you shape up and_ do your schoolwork on time.

"What's _happened _to you?" Jojo's mother demands, glaring at Jojo, who is trapped on the couch and wishing frantically to be anywhere else but here and now and with this going on. "You used to be such a good student. Are you going through some kind of prepubertal rebellious phase?"

"I know what it is," Jojo's father says darkly. "It's all that overactive imagination." He turns to Jojo. "Look, we admire your creativity, but it's time to grow up! You can't live off in your own head forever, you've got to start living in the real world!" He loads every word with emphasis. "You. Are. Too. Old. To. Have. Imaginary. Friends!"

"I'm going to bed," Jojo whispers, and flees down the hallway, leaving both parents looking at each other and sighing identical long sighs.

Jojo slams the bedroom door and locks it and leans on it, all the while knowing that it won't make any difference whatsoever. Thinks – well, one Think, at least – never bother to use doors. They just appear on location whenever the desire strikes and disappear again on the same whim, generally at the most inopportune moments possible.

But nobody appears. So Jojo leaves the door, flops onto the bed face down, and tries not to scream. Eleven-year-olds don't cry, and besides, this eleven-year-old is not feeling tearful so much as very, very, _very_ angry–

"What happened this time?" asks the Cat, suddenly there and lounging back on the bed. Jojo does scream, just a little bit into the pillow. The Cat has stopped by at inopportune moments before – actually pretty much every time the Cat appears is inopportune – but this probably takes the cake as the biggest judgement error of the feline's not inconsiderable lifespan.

Jojo is silent, mostly because resisting the urge to strangle the Think then and there is taking priority over pretty much every other brain function. The Cat taps the eleven-year-old's shoulder with a gloved index finger. "Hello? Jojo? Say something? Hey, c'mon, kid, talk to me. What's wrong?"

Jojo doesn't look up, can't deal with looking at the Think who started all this, without whose hat – that stupid, stupid hat – _none_ of this would have happened. The Thinker grinds out between clenched teeth, "Everyone tells me I'm too old for imaginary friends. My friends at school tell me, my aunt Linda told me, even my parents tell me. My Thinking does nothing but get me in trouble. _Nothing. _When I Think at school they say I'm spacing out, and when I say things in class I get in trouble with the teachers for not doing things their way."

The Cat looks at Jojo sideways, either not picking up on the tone of voice or choosing to ignore it, and flops back on the bed in a studied sulk. "Well, if _that's_ your priority list, schoolwork over the Cat who taught you how to fly–"

"You didn't teach me anything." Jojo's voice is hard. "I taught _myself._ You're just a figment of my imagination." The dreamer, the kid who had wanted to be an astronaut-deep-sea-fisher-plumber-inventor, flips over and stands up. The Cat scrambles up as well. Jojo is taller than when they first met, but the Cat has grown proportionally right along, because obviously – _obviously_ – this is what figments of one's imagination tend to do. "It's not just my Thinks on their own that get me in trouble. I _try_ not to speak up in class but you're always there trying to get me to, and I _try_ not to argue with people but you're always telling me to express my _opinion._ _You_ do nothing but get me in trouble and you're. Not. Even. Real." Jojo stands up on tiptoe and hisses into the Cat's face. "_Are you?_"

The Cat blinks a few times in a catlike way, and says mildly, "Does it matter?"

"Yes!" Jojo shouts. "It does! But you know what? I know the answer already. Go away. Go away and don't come back. I don't need you anymore."

The Cat fakes sadness almost convincingly, but the smirk doesn't quite manage to hide. "All right, I'll be going, but first–"

"No," Jojo says. "Don't sing. I mean it this time. Just _leave._" And the Cat is, quite suddenly, Thinked very, very far away, too far away to reappear and make any further appeal. Jojo's Thinking powers have gotten quite a lot stronger since that first day, and that is, of course, saying something.

That's that. Jojo goes back to the living room and the parents and apologizes, and goes back to school and to friends and to principal and apologizes, and puts Thinks aside for more important, practical things. Dreaming's over.

Jojo's parents and teachers are pleased at the story which the next report card and the next tells, and Jojo is pleased that they're pleased. The Cat bangs on the glass partition between worlds, trying to get Jojo to look up, but there's too much school and too many other things to worry about, and the Thinks are no longer visible to the preteen's maturing eye.

...

And then Jojo is twelve, in sixth grade, not particularly loving middle school so far. Hangs out with the kids on the soccer team because they're really the closest thing to a peer group that's turned up so far in this scary and adult world of locker combinations and kissing and PG-13 movies. Doesn't even look up when a random almost-friend at lunch one day asks "Hey, Jojo, what happened to those invisible friends of yours?"

Just says softly, "I sent them away."

The mocking laughter of all the kids at the lunch table, the Thinker reflects, sounds a lot like that of the Wickershams.

...

The sneaky thing about memories is that the good ones stick around longer than the bad ones. One evening early that summer, alone in the house watching a boring and stupid movie even though the night outside is wonderful and filled with fireflies and stars and warm summer-scented air – hanging out outside is a kids' thing to do, even if it's probably better for you than staying in your room all summer – Jojo can't forget a drive-in movie they went to the summer before last, just the three of them, self and mom and Cat, after a long day at school. Jojo had been complaining about how drive-in movies were such a stupid thing to go to, like something out of the fifties or something, and the Cat kept trying to argue that classic things were the foundation of modern society and shouldn't be insulted, and Jojo's mom had left to get a bucket of popcorn and hadn't come back, and the next memory there was was of being carried upstairs and tucked into bed and a voice which most certainly didn't belong to either parent whispering "Good night, Jojo" –

Stupid. Stupid, stupid. Memory plays tricks on you, and the Cat had always been a jerk. It's just easier to remember the very, very few times when it had been different, and at this point, Jojo recalls, it shouldn't be easy to remember any of the times. It was all made up anyway. Better just to turn off the movie and go to bed.

...

Jojo at thirteen learns learns about World War II and how to solve for _x, _learns that science welcomes Thinkers and learns how to write poetry, learns how to hide things from adults and that one should never take the blame if one can manage not to, learns that bullying can come from both skinny curly-haired girls in science and towering dope-brained jocks in PE, learns that childhood fantasies are things which should be forgotten at all costs, and relearns how to get used to loneliness. Rainy afternoons and iPods are two of life's small blessings, as are locks on bedroom doors and long sleeves to hide things that no theoretically-concerned adult _really_ wants to discuss.

"You should start taking soccer again," Jojo's mom suggests for the fifty-seventh time. "It looks like there are lots of nice kids on the team–"

"I told you, I don't do sports," Jojo tells her for the fifty-seventh time. "I'm not one of those kids. I just like to Think. Alone."

...

Jojo is fourteen years old and locked in a green-walled bathroom stall at school, writing poetry on the walls because this is the only way to guarantee it will be read, even if the comments of "FAG" and "FREAK" do cover it over after a few days. Today there is a scribbled message in the way of the last line of the last poem, not one of the usual obscenities or "I luv [random unrecognized first name or initials]"s, but something a bit more puzzling and therefore, in Jojo's view, gratifying. Just two words. _Anything's possible._

Jojo traces the words with a trailing fingertip, studying the loopy, almost-childlike-but-not-quite handwriting. Memories, so many painfully happy memories, wriggle under the surface of the former Thinker's subconscious, trying to make a break for the light. Half-seen outlines of strangely-shaped trees and buildings, human-like animals with wondrous silhouettes, a man and a woman in yellow and a girl with dark ringlets and a little tail and a huge man with a tiny fluffy clover and someone in a suit and a strange and somehow significant hat, someone tall and elegant and annoying, and–

The writing is _wrong_, Jojo decides, snapping out of it. Just the work of another hipster kid scribbling an overused catchphrase in a moment of boredom. Anything is not possible. Anything is not possible at all. You can't get parents to love each other again after they've divorced. You can't turn mean kids into nice kids, or even get them to think rationally about things which affect _them_ as well as the larger picture. You can't defy gravity, you can't stop the sun from setting, you can't make a broken glass whole again. There's a never-ending list of things which just aren't possible.

The bell rings then, and the next time Jojo returns to that particular stall, the words are gone as if they'd never existed.

...

Age fifteen comes and goes quietly and without fuss, just like Jojo does now. Science is logical in a way that people are not and 'Think' as a noun is grammatically incorrect. High school is a thing to be gotten over with, and it and Jojo are engaged in a constant battle to see which one of them will last longer. On the bad days, it can be very hard indeed to tell which one is winning.

...

Think of a hospital, grey-walled and impersonal, shut off from the outside world for those inside it like a high-tech facility in a sci-fi movie. Think of a ward on the ground floor. Think of a room in that ward, tangled full of machines and monitors standing mostly unused in the sterilized linoleum corners, practically empty except for a few not really very important things.

Think of a Cat, not quite running but certainly speed-walking, through the mazes of hallways, toward that room...

Jojo hasn't been making much of a fuss lately. School and so forth going okay, nothing upsetting the Thinking radar, seemingly doing just fine if maybe not stellar. The Cat has just been peeking in on the kid every couple of months, in the form of a telemarketer or Jehovah's Witness or some such, to make sure that everything is going okay, but there's never the slightest flicker of recognition on Jojo's face or voice upon opening the door or picking up the phone, and the Cat refuses to go through that any more often. It's easier just to find other, younger children, ones whose minds are still free and un-influenced by the pressures of society, and try not to mind when their Thinks come nowhere near to matching up.

But then there's this day, and a sudden deep-seated itch of anxiety, almost akin to worry, which comes out of nowhere and points directly to Jojo's hometown. The Cat ignores it at first, dismissing it as some kind of mental mosquito bite, but it just grows and grows and grows, refusing to go away, demanding to be attended to. And so eventually, just to humor it, the Cat wanders down to Jojo's hometown to see what's going on.

And, after a few short question sessions with various teachers and neighbors and townsfolk, rushes _much_ more concernedly off to the hospital.

The room is just... a room. A hospital room like any other, clean and white and buzzing slightly with fluorescent lighting, with a curtain dividing it in half so it can take two patients if need be. Two beds, two IV drips, two of nearly everything, but just one of each in use. Just one person in the room, tangled asleep in the sheets of the nearer bed. Just one small and inconsequential-looking Thinker.

One small and inconsequential-looking Thinker who is suddenly being shaken awake by a very worried Cat.

"Jojo! Jojo, are you all right? What is going _on_?"

Jojo shivers awake and blinks slowly, pale and washed out and apathetic and completely not matching up to the Cat's frantic energy. The panic in the Think's voice is surprising, considering exactly how many life-threatening things the Cat has insouciantly inflicted on Jojo over the years, but then, the Cat is a creature composed of surprises.

Jojo grunts something unintelligible, eyes refusing to focus on the blur of red and white and black standing over the bed – nothing unusual about it, of course not – and rolls over to go back to sleep–

And freezes, brain finally kicking in just a bit. Sits up in bed and stares at the Cat.

"Jojo," the Cat says again, completely serious for once. "Are. You. Okay?"

"I don't know you," Jojo says eventually. It comes out in a whisper.

The Thinker looks... not just tired. Scared. Very, very scared, not of the Cat or of anything else present or absent, but just scared in general. It's the same look that the Cat noticed all those years ago, since the first time they met, in all those empty wrinkles in time and space when there was nothing else happening and they were just... being. Back then it was always in a dull, back-of-the-mind way, something which the kid probably didn't even notice, but now it's in the forefront to the exclusion of everything else.

Jojo is a Thinker and Jojo was always terrified of the knowledge which being a Thinker imparted. Always terrified of being able to see the world the way it really is, and always alone in that knowledge.

Alone even when it wasn't really necessary to be.

The Cat sits down on the end of the bed, and the springs creak under the weight of some kind of reality, Thinking or otherwise. "I think you do know me."

Jojo breathes heavily, in and out, a small sound still managing to fill the room. Says at last, "How did you find me?"

The Cat starts to speak, then catches Jojo's eye and stops, admits: "I asked around."

"You could have come earlier," Jojo says. Not looking at the Cat, voice like a switchblade. "Before I took the damn pills."

And because there's nothing else to say, the Cat says, "Sorry," and puts out an arm and pulls the Thinker in close. "Sorry I couldn't be a better mentor, kid."

"Yeah, you should be sorry," Jojo says, but doesn't pull away.

All the things thickening the air till then, all the implications of childhood and the conventions of how things and people used to work, dissipate in the silence. The air is lighter afterwards, easier to sit up in somehow. Neither of them really knows who the other is anymore, they realize. They're going to have to learn everything all over again.

Which shouldn't be too difficult, really, considering that Jojo could never really figure the Cat out, even before, and Jojo's actual inner workings have always been a mystery to the Cat even if what pushes the Thinker's buttons hasn't.

"They're letting me out tonight," Jojo says, pulling away after a long while and straightening up, proud of and somewhat worried by this announcement. An unspoken question hangs on the Thinker's shoulders, and the Cat answers it. "Well, then, I hope you've got room in your room–" _(and in your life, again_, is the question hidden behind the words) "–for one extra Cat."

Jojo smiles shyly, and in the air hovers the affirmation that things are going to work out better, this time around.

"Yeah," says the Thinker. "I think I probably do."


End file.
